Last week (it just appeared on their transactions page), the Astros signed LHP Bryan Sammons to a minor league deal (no spring training invite). Sammons, who turns 28 in April, was an 8th-round pick of the Twins out of Western Carolina. He was a senior sign who got $10,000 and he spent his entire pro career in the Twins system until he was released at the end of the minor league season last year. Sammons shifted to the bullpen in 2022 after working as a starter for much of his career. He's had success in the lower levels but has yet to clear the AA hump (5.45 ERA in 69 appearances, 30 starts). With AA Wichita, Sammons went 3-7 with 2 saves and a 5.76 ERA in 37 games (1 start, 50 IP). He allowed 39 runs (32 earned), 47 hits (14 HR), walked 18 (1 intentionally), and struck out 59. Opponents hit .239 off Sammons in 2022.
DSL and FCL games don't track individual pitches, but assigns pitches based on the result of the AB. A swinging strikeout is considered no balls and 3 swinging strikes, regardless of how many pitches were thrown. Fluery had a great season, but the swinging strike rate is almost certainly exaggerated.
Thanks. That makes much more sense and those numbers should be ignored in favor of K%. Still, as limited of value as K% is at that level, it’s interesting to note that he led the DSL (min 10IP) in K-BB% by over 10%.
No doubt. I have been playing around with the Astros leaderboard for DSL pitchers over the last 10 years and in terms of strikeout to walk rates, it was the most dominant season of the 323 individual seasons that fell into my sample. While I think drawing comparisons between the two is unwise, Cristian Javier really stuck out as someone who excelled in that regard. Interestingly enough to me, I tried to add a contact quality component by folding in LD and IFFB rates, which seemed to help the analysis since 5 of the top 8 seasons and 6 of the top 20 belonged to future major leaguers (Michael Feliz, Nivaldo Rodriguez. Cristian Javier shows up twice for his work with both DSL squads in 2015, Richard Rodriguez, and Hector Perez at #20). While Fluery still shows up in the 90th percentile at #31, the top spot for the 2022 DSL Astros belonged to Engel Daniel Peralta, an 18 year old 6'4" 190 lb righty from the Dominican Republic who, according to his transaction log, signed just 10 days before playing his first professional game. It has occurred to me that my analysis ended up looking similar to a simplistic version of Matt Collier's FaBIO system, so if analyzing minor league pitching numbers is something anyone finds interesting, I suspect he put a lot more thought and work into his analysis than I did here.
Thanks, I really appreciate it. Truth be told, I only found this site because someone on TCB mentioned you regularly posted here a couple of years ago. Since then it's been one of my favorite little corners of the internet as an unlikely oasis of mostly intelligent Astros discussion.
I'm in agreement with Snake, I love your posts, so thank you. I, too, found this place literally because somebody mentioned at TCB that Snake posted here and I navigated here because of him. And I've loved this place ever since, and it has helped teach me a lot about the game, even though I've been watching baseball since I was a kid in the 80's.
I love coming to this site for the quality (usually, lol) of the discussions on most Houston sports. I also like that I can get all 3 here. I know of battleredblog, but what is TCB? glad you are all here.
Not been a big fan of Keith Law, but this excerpt from this year's meeting farm ranking may be the worst take of his that I've seen: Not to be a broken record, but the Astros drafted without scouts for years, and it showed in the results, which were also hurt when the team was drafting at the end of the first round rather than the top. While I think Astros farm is a little thin, it isn't because they didn't acquire talent well, it is because the talent is in the majors (on the Astros or elsewhere).
AND While our farm “rankings” have been bad for a while we have still produced way more mlb talent than many teams who have been ranked high. And some of that talent is high end arms which just helped win rings
IIRC Keith Law did not like how Luhnow ran his scouting department. Luhnow's scouting would be done mainly through video tape. Luhnow did send non-scouts to college games with high speed cameras to tape the pitcher's rotation speeds ... ie to get better video tape on pitchers. Luhnow likely did draft Hunter Brown (5th round, 2019) for his rotation speeds.
They also almost completely punted on international free agency after 2016, only signing three players for seven figures or more between then and 2022, two of them Cuban defectors (Pedro León and the since-released Elián Rodriguez). They did also lose their first two picks in 2021 to penalties for the sign-stealing scandal, but had a strong 2022 draft that mixed some high-floor and medium-ceiling college players, which at least should provide more tradeable players to keep the big-league club going. He had us ranked 26th.
I get that. Maybe the Astros got lucky results, but sweet diggity were the results spectacular. I get that the Astros have been living off prospects acquired under Luhnow and the current farm isn't as strong as a lot of teams as the Astros have been developing great major league players faster than they are replenishing the minors. It just was a dig because the Astros did something he didn't like, glossed over the fact that it likely setup one of the greatest 11 year runs by a team in the majors, and blames the current talent in the minors on what he didn't like.
